Tropico 2: Pirate's Cove Review

Software piracy, nice and legal.

One of the banes of gaming is the product you enjoy at first, only to have it go sour for you after a few weeks. There can be any number of reasons for this: gameplay that becomes repetitive. A lack of game balance that reveals itself only after you've played the product in a certain way. The thrill of first-rate graphics and music, fading away before a third rate release. For me, the original Tropico uncomfortably fits into this pattern of praise followed by dissatisfaction. I played it heavily and lost the glow fairly soon, because the demands on what to build, when and where, felt far too restrictive, and the atmosphere, very thin. There wasn't a hint of the extraordinarily realistic flavor of Jim Gasperini's 1988 classic, Hidden Agenda, a simulation of Latin American rule that both PopTop Software's Phil Steinmeyer and I loved, and the game he told me hem planned to emulate when making Tropico.

So why is the old fahrt going on about the original Tropico at the start of a review about a different game...? I'm glad you asked that, and so politely, too! It's because while Tropico 2 uses the same basic interface and provides a similar kind of island-building strategic simulation experience as its predecessor, I find myself better pleased with the results. Tropico 2 has no pretensions to design-your-own-Latino-culture. There's a more open-ended quality to your progress in any given scenario, and a quirky humor that lives far across town from the white picket fence of reality.

The Premise You're a Pirate King; or rather, let's call you a Pirate CEO. It's more appropriate, given your task: the construction of a Caribbean pirate island during the 17th century. (However, developers Frog City probably chose the title Pirate King for your leader because it features prominently in that comic opera masterpiece, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. To give you some flavor of the work, just remember that Penzance was a Victorian Era seaside resort town.) Other pirate leaders work for you, raiding settlements for captives, and sailing the seas in search of loot. Your goal is to make their lives more secure, offering them the comforts and luxuries that any seaborne sociopaths could reasonably expect. At the same time, you take care of your prisoners, who do all the island labor, seeing to their basic needs while instilling them with a healthy dose of fear.

As with other city-style construction sims, the primary pleasure lies in the choices you make, and the challenges of balancing micromanaged detail into a winning combination. Life isn't simply a matter of sending out pirates to grab money. A lot hinges on pirate and prisoner satisfaction. The two aren't identical, and are frequently at odds. Pirates want food, drink, wenches, rest, hoards, gambling, well-defended islands and a feeling of anarchy, while prisoners thrive on food, rest, religion, fear, and a sense of order in their lives. There are dozens of two and three-tiered product systems to build that satisfy these desires, like Tobacco Farm-Cigar Maker-Gambling Den. You'll have to arm your pirates and their ships, too, since few buccaneers ever sank an enemy by reputation, alone. Which accounts for the Iron Mine-Blast Furnace-Blacksmith/Gunsmith/Cannon Foundry product system: all the sabers, guns, and cannons your crews can manage, produced twenty-four hours a day under this distinctly odd, never-setting Caribbean sun.

Periodically, you send individual ships (six different models, each with its own speed, weapons and crew capacity, etc) to cruise the Caribbean and coastal waters, which are divided into eighteen regions. Only your own region's wealth and danger are well known at game's start, but reconnoitering missions can help. Sometimes your pirates will discover a European colony, or a wealthy trade route. Where cash is likeliest, the fighting will be worst; and while you take no part in the battles, you can at least instruct your buccaneers beforehand to board, pound, or harass the enemy, in order of decreasing danger/rewards. Each crewmember is individually rated for swordsmanship, marksmanship, gunnery, navigation, and seamanship, while your pirate captains are additionally scored for loyalty, courage, leadership, and notoriety. A particularly notorious captain, for instance, will gain more recruits from attacked vessels, and quash mutinies more handily.

You'll have to set policies as well regarding the treatment of ships and captives from their different foreign powers. Spain breathing down your neck because of all those hostages you've taken from their ships? Why not free your French hostages and swear to never attack their ships again? If the French and your island end up in a harmonious relationship, you can declare them your patrons. Once one of the great powers is your patron, the others can never attack your base, if they somehow discover its location. For you don't want to be friendless when a European power finds your island home. It's more misery than even a wizened old pirate like yourself deserves to bear.

Of course, other problems can just as easily shiver your timbers, and call for a new set of underwear. Sufficiently unsatisfied captives might become emboldened enough to escape; and when many of them survive, they'll usually return to lead a mass insurrection. By contrast, your buccaneers are a lot more direct. If one intensely dislikes your rule, they'll simply attack the nearest pirate until somebody dies. (The survivor feels much better about life. The casualty has no complaints, either.) If they all intensely dislike your rule, they'll just kill you and put somebody else in your place.